Paranoid and delusional thinking is defined as the generalized distrust and
suspicion of others. Individuals suffering from paranoid thinking may sometimes
have dreams that are characterized by intuitions and feelings of grandeur
bordering on pure fantasy. In art or film, one might give flight to such
fantasies or daydreams without disrupting everyday social reality, especially,
if you can convince others to assume your version of an alternative social
reality, albeit temporarily.

Dinesh D’Souza’s film “2016: Obama’s America” manages to do just this while
craftily walking the fine line between partial truths and fiction about the
early socialization, family life and political philosophy of the 44th president
of the US, Barack Hussein Obama, who also happens to be the first black
president of the US with a multiracial, multicultural and multi-religious
lineage and genealogy rooted in America, Africa and Indonesia.

Airlift to America (1959-63): There are many historical firsts that President
Obama has to his credit, but D’Souza is overwhelmingly concerned with
establishing an apparent anti-colonial strain in his worldview acquired from his
Kenyan father. The fact that Obama’s father was part of “the airlift to America”
sponsored by many civil rights leaders, non-profit organizations and the Kennedy
family simply misses D’Souza’s purview. Why? Because it does not fit the
anti-American or anti-colonial narrative he imputes to Obama’s father and to the
president.

This is a significant ‘sin of omission’ if you’re trying to understand the
absentee father’s anti-colonial sentiments that shaped the first black
President. Obama’s father was the beneficiary of American goodwill and
philanthropy. How could his son think unwell of America? “My story wouldn’t be
possible in any other country,” Obama has said repeatedly. But this is all
rhetorical, the words of an imposter, according to D’Souza.

Similarly, the fact that Obama’s father wrote news articles praising American
society, Hawaiian multiculturalism, and his White Hawaiian hosts are also lost
on D’Souza because this would simply crack the colonial or anti-colonial
spectacles he wants the audience to try on in a darkened theater.

Instead, D’Souza finds a line in East African Journal in 1965 where Obama’s
father suggested 100% taxation to build the newly independent Kenyan economy.
This is evidence for the motive for $16 trillion U.S. debt under Obama, a large
percentage of which was incurred by the Republican predecessor? But the son has
become just like the father, according to D’Souza.

9/11 and Pearl Harbor Attacks: In another blatantly biased claim D’Souza states
that the annexation of Hawaii in 1959 was primarily driven by colonization of
the natives, which causes resentments even today, while making not a single
mention of the fact that native Hawaiians, unlike the mainland US, welcomed
newcomers to the islands and married them. Thus, the interracial marriage rates
in Hawaii have always been high. The sacrifices of Hawaiians in WW-II in the
aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attacks and prior to the annexation are completely
missing from this distorted film.

Similarly, D’Souza fails to mention that Obama’s maternal grandfather’s service
(Stanley Armour Dunham) in the war also deeply ties Obama to Hawaiian soil and
to the memory of the Pearl Harbor attacks, the only other instance when America
has been attacked at home prior to September 11, 2011. Why does D’Souza not
include any suggestion of these important historical turning points in American
life that directly intersect with Obama’s biography? Because he wants you to
believe that Obama is not really cut from the same American cloth as other
presidents.

According to D’Souza, Obama’s founding father-figures are not Washington,
Jefferson and not even Abraham Lincoln, whose career path Obama has imitated,
but rather shady group of communist sympathizers, such as, Frank Marshall Davis,
Bill Ayers, late Columbia Professor Edward Said, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and
the Harvard Law Professor Robert Unger.

D’Souza tells us at the outset that he is a new immigrant, whose pigmentation is
not that different from most African Americans. He reveals this to highlight his
debating skills in civil rights. He has questioned many civil rights leaders
about the ‘real’ hard evidence of racism, he claims, including a debate with
Reverend Jesse Jackson. Mr. Jackson issued a reply that “racism has gone
underground” to which D’Souza responded with dismay.

Well, D’Souza has been trying to unearth the hard evidence of racism in American
society ever since; his many books and films claim that racism does not exist.
It must be quite a feat to invent a career on a revelation that you’ve denied
prima facie but continue to gain from financially and politically.

Dinesh D’Souza and George Obama (President Obama's Brother)

The Indonesian Coup (1965-66): D’Souza peddles Indonesian history from Obama’s
autobiography, but curiously fails to reveal the central reason for the
disillusionment suffered by Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in Jakarta in
the late 1960’s, namely, the nexus of American oil companies and CIA’s deep
involvement in the remaking of the fledgling democracy in South East Asia. When
Ann Dunham landed in Jakarta, thousands of Chinese had been slaughtered by the
Indonesian military in a bloody coup. The U.S. had decided to place their man,
General Suharto, in charge of the emerging Islamic democracy.

Clearly, D’Souza commits another significant ‘sin of omission’. Why? Because
D’Souza wants you to believe that Ann Dunham was somehow genetically predisposed
to “not think well of America” as a liberal and passed this trait onto her son
by idealizing his anti-colonial African father.

D’Souza gets Daniel Pipes, the Middle East expert, to state explicitly at the
end of the film: “This president does think well of the United States”. Mr.
Pipes is the individual who was part of the rumor mill in 2007 during the
primaries that Obama had attended a madrasa while living in Indonesia,
suggesting that he was a closet Muslim. We don’t get any images of Koranic
schools in this film, but there are plenty of fringe theories about Muslim or
Islamic nations floating around in the film, such as, the Middle Eastern region
might turn into the “United States of Islam”.

It can be argued that Obama’s landmark election in 2008 was partly a reflection
of several macro and secular trends:

Emerging multipolar world as suggested by many internationalists and foreign
relations experts;

Correlated with globalization sped-up by the onset of Internet technology
fostered by American firms;

Direct effect of American decline brought on by the two long wars in Iraq and
the AfPak region, as argued by many historians; and

Obama’s global biography resonated remarkably well to all of the above
challenges Americans are facing as we move ahead in the 21st century.

Based on the majority of the published reviews of the film, only D’Souza’s right
wing supporters seem to really ‘get’ how this anti-colonial virus may have been
passed on from the father to the son, eventually driving an improbable rise to
the American presidency to level it once and for all or to make America a
dethroned superpower. This is what D’Souza interprets is the real meaning of
“transformational change” in the Obama world, where the slogan of “Hope and
Change” really means “Bankrupt and Destroy”.

D’Souza’s film further obscures the ‘narrative truth’ with many outright factual
errors or ‘sins of commission’, as reported by the Associated Press:

Blaming Obama for the national debt of $16 trillion but never explaining the
doubling of the debt under Republicans in 2008;

Failing to mention the killing of Osama bin Laden and the escalation of drone
strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while accusing Obama of harboring Muslim
sympathies; D’Souza ignores the non-partisan polling data which repeatedly
indicates Obama has the lowest approval ratings in the Muslim majority nations
due to drone attacks;

Despite the severe trade and economic sanctions against Iran accusing Obama of
inaction against the Iranian regime to challenge Israel;

Removal of Churchill’s loaned bust from the Oval Office was scheduled for a
return, not because of Obama’s anti-colonial sentiment;

Completely unsubstantiated claim that Punahou Academy teaches “oppression
studies” without any interviews or written documentation.

Despite these mind-numbing fallacies, there is a perfectly rational way to
understand D’Souza’s wild interpretations in film-making. He represents for our
times what Richard Hofstadter called a generation ago “the paranoid style of
American politics”.

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we
have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now
demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got
out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I
believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not
necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other
word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and
conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

As a new immigrant who could have expanded the circle of knowledge, D’Souza
disappointingly has hitched his wagon to a regressive trend in American
politics, which produces more irrational heat and noise than a reasoned
judgment. He has taken one of the more hopeful and inspiring American stories in
many generations and turned it into a dark and sinister documentary for
political gains.

D’Souza’s paranoid dreams do not align with the American dream and are not good
for this country or the world.